


Living Fire

by manyface



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Poetry, brief jude/agnes, oof ouch my fear avatars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 07:42:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20671736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manyface/pseuds/manyface
Summary: She didn't have to go to waste, but in a way the change was due: the ship had been destroyed; this is just the water, soaking through.





	Living Fire

Everyone knows that shattered hearts   
Always burn brightest – ardent pain   
Weaves lucid membranes between parts   
That long to necrotize and curse   
The living fire that remains –   
They took a jackhammer to hers.

Stained glass since birth; stitched into place;   
Defaced to shards of a messiah,   
She speaks their liturgy ablaze.   
Beloved, she dutifully breaks:   
An echo of the living fire   
That gave her, but now only takes.

How can a pyre be so cold?   
How long do martyrs still suffice,   
Clinging to splinters once ensouled?   
Bound by the ritual of hate,   
She burns her lightless sacrifice.   
How must a living fire wait?

A child caught in the spider’s sight –   
It was a trial of her power.   
She set the web’s sly strings alight.   
Around her wrists, they scoured and turned,   
And as the living fire devoured,   
It was not him but her who burned.

Her scars are holy celebrations –   
Those wire traps singed to her skin   
Ensnare a hungry congregation.   
The living fire sanctifies   
All that is blistering within,   
Makes icons of her stoic lies.

They idolise her. There is love.   
There’s vivid torture in her name.   
It deifies, makes embers of   
What’s hardly left. A victim’s tears   
Mirror her own in boiling shame:   
A living fire’s choking fears.

They always sear the same refrain:   
The living fire living on soot   
That sacramental candles claim.   
Their wax is pliant and won’t snap   
Into cracked parodies of roots –   
Dark, leafless trees with doubt for sap.

One devotee, with steady hands   
And fire living past the altar,   
Melts into her and reprimands   
Young scorched humanity, unseen.   
She snuffs it out each time she falters,   
Kisses like blood and kerosene. 

She draws it out, like a confession:    
Her worship’s heat precise, divine.    
The living fire rewards obsession.    
A deity’s heart must not be healed –   
No, every wound is by design,    
A choice to weaponize and wield

Her torment like a dragon’s ire.    
How can one hurt feed a religion,    
Flesh remnants of a living fire?    
Charred and congealed into an idol,    
Fate cauterised into a prison,    
She wonders if she’s earned her title. 

For every suffering hymn and prayer   
That serves each well-kept cicatrix:    
Adorned with incense and despair,   
The tissues of her heart, abused,    
Contort with living fire’s licks   
And pump all that she’s left to lose. 

It does not beat. She does not breathe.    
The living fire does not care.   
She immolates in their belief,   
Bathed bare in destiny so deep.   
It hangs like ashes in the air,    
Smoulders of promises to keep. 

A shattered heart burns brightest, yes –   
When offered none but kindling:   
To feel, feed past that is a test,    
And she’s no everlasting flame.    
The living fire is dwindling,   
A devastation self-contained. 

Her personhood’s frostbitten touch   
Will sever her immortal coil.    
In death, it will not matter much,    
But as she bears the degradation   
Of deicide, her heart recoils:   
She does embody desolation. 

**Author's Note:**

> dude i desolated myself. ouch  
also the summary is lyrics from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxtG-6r4Du0) bc it makes me fucking CRY abt agnes


End file.
